When It Comes To Electronics I'm Dumber Than Dirt

[Bib Overalls]

I've always wanted to have a TV in my shop. It is fairly close to the house but all of the solutions have required cable and that meant tunneling under some concrete. That, I'm thinking, will be a goat rope and if I pull it off my wife will want a water line under the driveway.

We have Direct TV (satellite) and AT&T cell phones. Well, AT&T has sucked up Direct TV and they now offer phone and TV packages with better overall pricing. So, today my wife had a chat with a sales representative and we now have a merged account. At the same time she opted to go with their new Genie boxes that give us a wifi type of network. We no longer have a hard cable network in the house.

Within three hours the techs were here to do the swap out. I asked the tech about putting a receiver box in the shop. He told me that my shop was within range but the metal cladding would stop the signal dead. I asked about an external antenna for the shop and the answer was there is no such thing. Then he explained a way to get what I want by running a RG6 cable.

After several hours searching online I came to the conclusion that he might be right. And then again, I my simply be so dumb I don't know what to search for. I do know that combinations of the words "antenna, outside, genie, directv, external, wifi and wireless" produce thousands of hits for all manner of antenni, none that seem to be a solution for my problem.

Before I get my old entrenching tool out of the attic, does anyone here have a wireless solution for my problem?

 

[baba louey]

An outside antenna should pick up the major broadcast networks (ABC,CBS,NBC,etc) and probably some smaller networks if you have a modern TV with a digital tuner in it. If you have a window in the shop, maybe putting the receiver box at the window might let it communicate with the one in the house.

 

[Radix2]

Build a little wood or plastic birdhouse on the outside your steel siding and put the receiver in there...

 

[Bib Overalls]

No windows for security reasons.

I really want cable so I can watch car building shows on Velocity.

 

[James-W]

Can you put a satellite dish outside the garage and run a coax cable inside? If you could that should solve your problem.

 

[Git]

Before signing a new 2 year contract or whatever it is they require - do you have a decent internet connection? (there are other options other than satellite if you do and they are a heck of a lot cheaper)

If you don't, as James-W mentioned, have them install a separate satellite dish on your shop

 

[ddawg16]

Here is a discussion related to your issue

https://www.tivocommunity.com/community/index.php?threads/wifi-range-extender-for-mini.543885/

Personally, I'd just run the RG6 along with a Cat6 line

 

[RWorth]

Build a little wood or plastic birdhouse on the outside your steel siding and put the receiver in there...

I have an outdoor bar on my PT deck, 8 months of the year it is totally open with just a roof a back wall and 2 6' side walls, the rest is open, despite my TV guy telling me electronics wont last a year outside in New England , I have had a big screen LED TV, a surround sound stereo with household speakers, and a wifi modem out there for about 8 years now.

So that bird house suggestion of Radix2 will work. Make sure it has ventilation for the summer to keep it cool.

https://www.garagejournal.com/forum/attachment.php?attachmentid=725131&stc=1&d=1515839384

 

[Bib Overalls]

Before signing a new 2 year contract or whatever it is they require - do you have a decent internet connection? (there are other options other than satellite if you do and they are a heck of a lot cheaper)

If you don't, as James-W mentioned, have them install a separate satellite dish on your shop

Originally we had hard line SuddenLink cable TV and Internet. It seemed like they jacked the price of TV service every month and the "packages" of shows did not match our viewing interest. My wife was talking about it with the lady who does her nails and it turns out her husband was a DirectTV installer. She came home and told me we had cut the cable. The TV service was and continues to be excellent. The Internet service was a joke. It was wind and rain sensitive and we used up our monthly subscription in less than a week. So we have gone back to SuddenLink for Internet only. Price is stable and the service is excellent.

Personally, I'd just run the RG6 along with a Cat6 line

I think you are right.

I have an outdoor bar on my PT deck, 8 months of the year it is totally open with just a roof a back wall and 2 6' side walls, the rest is open, despite my TV guy telling me electronics wont last a year outside in New England , I have had a big screen LED TV, a surround sound stereo with household speakers, and a wifi modem out there for about 8 years now.

So that bird house suggestion of Radix2 will work. Make sure it has ventilation for the summer to keep it cool.

https://www.garagejournal.com/forum/attachment.php?attachmentid=725131&stc=1&d=1515839384

I made the mistake of showing your "Key West" style outdoor adult party center to my wife. She wants one. I told her we did not have that many friends but she is insistant.

 

[Augus7us]

Hey Bib,

Since I have some insight into this I'll try to offer some advice. Something I can't do with a lot of questions around here

Here are the two options I would consider in your situation.

1. Outdoor / Indoor wireless mesh routers. I looked into this recently as I just bought a house and will be running power and whatnot this spring to it. Mesh routers basically make a grid of wireless signal that is as small or as large as you want it, you just add mesh routers as needed. There is a guy on here with a real nice shop(s). I forget who he is but he had a high end house with three shops he called the north, east and south shops IIRC. He went into some detail how he used mesh routers to blanket all his shops and house with wireless using this method. I'll take a look at the gallery and see if I can find it for you.

2. Run coax and cat 5e or cat 6 (as mentioned above). Now a days with streaming video (fire sticks, roku, etc) coax does not offer much, so run at your discretion. Once you have cat5/6 cable out to the shop you can put a wireless router in there and it will route from your garage over your cat 5 cable to your router inside and out your modem or whatever your service provider gave you. You can run the one ethernet cable directly to a pc but I recommend just biting the bullet and putting a second router in the garage so you can use a streaming stick for the tv, connect your phone to the wireless, a guests tablet, etc. Its where everything is headed.

Both options require some technical know-how but option two is probably the easiest to setup and most common so a technically savy nephew or grandkid could help you out where mesh may be foreign to them. Mesh will also likely be more expensive also.

I'm running cat 5e because I have about 800ft of it and I'm never ever going to use more than 1Gb/s. Though if you have no cable at all and have to buy, get cat 6.

If you have neighbors real close, if you put wireless in your garage then I strongly suggest you have someone help that can do some basic security safegaurds on your wireless setup in the shop, regardless how you get it out there. With no security and using a cheaper router it is almost trivial for a malicious user to gain access and use your network to do illegal stuff.

I know its longwinded but I hope it helps. If you have any other questions I will be happy to help if I can.

-Clint

 

[manwithtools]

Do you have a wireless Genie on any of the other TV's? If you do, take it out to the garage and try it. No telling if the tech was correct about it working or not. Trying it will prove it one way or another.

If it does not work then RG6 it is. Wireless extenders or mesh networks are of no help here. The DirecTV wireless is proprietary.

You could conceivably add a DirecTV wireless video bridge (WVB) at a point in you house closest to your shop and that "might" get a wireless signal to the shop. My Mini-Genie in my shop is about 65 feet through 4 walls from my receiver and it works well.

Genie's don't have a provision for an external antenna. The idea of mounting the Genie in a box outside the building is intriguing, but I don't think the remote control will work through the building wall, so you won't be able to control the Genie.

 

[Augus7us]

If it does not work then RG6 it is. Wireless extenders or mesh networks are of no help here. The DirecTV wireless is proprietary.

I tried to look up this genie thing as I've never heard of one and can't find exactly what it is and don't have the time at the moment to take a deeper look.

If what you say is true then it is not internet access its some proprietary access point that only allows other genie devices access to the internet? If that is the case then I don't consider that "providing internet access". If Bibs can hook up a pc to it or configure a tablet to use it then it can be used as I described above, however without more technical details I'm can't say for sure.

Can anyone that owns one of these genies tell me in technical terms what it is? Is it a WAP? Does it provide a gateway address? How does it route to the internet? It has to do these things but admittedly they could lock all that down and only allow their stuff to use it.

-Clint

 

[James-W]

I think you guys are forgetting the opening poster mentioned that in order to run cables out there would mean going under concrete, something he does not want to get involved with. He could, however, cut a small trench in the concrete and put conduit into it and then run the cables in the conduit. Then fill in the gaps around the conduit with hydraulic concrete. I am not sure I would want to do that, but it would be an option I guess.

 

[manwithtools]

The Genies are not for internet access, they are for DirecTV tv "wireless" signal access. It's a DirecTV receiver that allows you to have a TV (or multiple tv's) anywhere within range of the main DVR or WVB without running any cables. It's wireless "TV", not wireless "internet".

The OP's original question was about having a TV in his shop supplied with the DirecTV Genie receiver, not about internet service.

In technical terms a Genie is a Wireless Video Bridge. The main DVR or WVB uses wireless ethernet technology (it even broadcasts an SSID) but the only thing that can utilize this signal is a wireless Genie.

 

[RWorth]

I made the mistake of showing your "Key West" style outdoor adult party center to my wife. She wants one. I told her we did not have that many friends but she is insistant.[/QUOTE]

You know if the wife likes it, you ARE going to have one. Let me know when you start building, I'll send you step by step instructions.

Only friend you need is JACK

https://www.garagejournal.com/forum/attachment.php?attachmentid=725250&stc=1&d=1515867939

https://www.garagejournal.com/forum/attachment.php?attachmentid=725251&stc=1&d=1515867939